Why recruiters will be the next creators — and what you should do about it
1. A New Path for Recruiters
Recruiting can be a great business. You help people find jobs, grow professionally, sometimes even believe in themselves again.
If you start earning as a recruiter today, you have three main options:
- Join an agency.
- Start an agency.
- Work in-house.
The agency path is hard to scale. Growth means hiring more recruiters and building more one-to-one relationships with candidates and clients. It’s labor-intensive, margin-thin, and in the age of AI, increasingly outdated.
But there’s a fourth option emerging — one that’s only possible now because of new technology and changing market dynamics:
The Recruiter Solopreneur.
This new model lets you:
- Own and grow a talent audience — like content creators own their subscriber base.
- Scale earnings by scaling your audience, not your hours.
- Earn like a 10-person agency without hiring anyone.
The reason this hasn’t happened before comes down to one thing: ownership.
2. The Ownership Problem
The true value of a recruiter is their network — the candidates they’ve met, the conversations they’ve had, the insights and trust they’ve built, and all the knowledge that result from it.
Each year, a recruiter interviews hundreds of people. That creates a goldmine of salary data, market intelligence, relationships, resumes and contact information.
But the moment the recruiter leaves an employer — agency or in-house — all of it stays behind in their ATS. It quickly becomes outdated and unused. The recruiter starts again from zero.
LinkedIn doesn’t solve this. You can’t segment your contacts, store interview feedback and notes, pull email addresses and phone numbers. You can’t take your talent network off Linkedin.
Your employer owns the data in their ATS. LinkedIn owns the data on their platform.
They benefit from the compounding value of your work. You don’t. Every time a recruiter moves to a new employer, they start from a clean sheet.
3. What If You Had Ownership?
Imagine you had saved every candidate, every conversation, every CV into your own system.
Four years from now, whether you change jobs or clients, you’d still have the same growing talent audience — and you’d be able to monetize it in multiple ways:
Most importantly, your value as a professional - either independent or as an employee - would be higher and higher, as you come with exclusive access to a growing network in your niche.
Your network would compound. Each search, each interview, each introduction would make the next one easier and more valuable.
This is exactly what happened in other industries:
- Writers left newspapers for Substack, where they own their readers directly.
- Teachers left schools for elearning platforms like Udemy.
- Video creators left TV networks for YouTube.
All of them now own their audience. All of them run scalable, profitable businesses with low overhead.
Recruiters can do the same — given the right platform.
Workfully helps Recruiters Solopreneurs to own and monetize their talent audience.
4. Workfully: The Recruiter’s Audience Platform
Workfully is built for one purpose:
Help Recruiters own and monetize their talent audience.
Today, you can use Workfully for free to:
- Store and organize all your candidates in your personal, compliant ATS.
- Post jobs for free in over 50 job boards, integrated into your recruiter profile
- Work with clients sharing anonymized profiles and job pipelines securely.
- Get clients through your Recruiter Profile on the Workfully marketplace
- Monetize by giving companies subscription access to your pools.
Recruiters on Workfully have already generated six-figure revenues, placing talent with billion-dollar startups and major enterprises — without hiring staff or doing any business development.
Right now, we give the platform away for free to help recruiters start building and compounding their network. Companies pay recruiters on subscription or per-hire, and we handle the business development and monetization.
5. The Future: Automatic Monetization of Past Work
The next step is where it gets interesting
Imagine you interviewed someone nine months ago. A client posts a job today, and your Workfully pool instantly alerts you: “This candidate from your pool is a perfect match. Want to submit them?”
You monetize work you did months ago — without lifting a finger.
Now multiply that by a pool of 10,000 candidates. Or 100,000. Or a million.
Soon, you’ll be able to:
- Focus exclusively on attracting, growing and giving value to your talent pool - doing zero business development
- Matching your candidates with jobs at scale, earning x10 or more what a normal recruiter earns
- Keep your pool growing automatically through AI-driven sourcing and content creation
- Monetizing your pool in new ways: salary reports, premium career coaching etc.
One recruiter will be able to run what looks, from the outside, like a full-scale agency — but without the overhead, payroll, or risk.
6. Why Now Is the Time
So far, over 5,000 recruiters are on the waitlist to join, as we have been onboarding only small cohorts. Shortly, we will be opening up the doors to more recruiters globally.
Early adopters on Workfully have a huge advantage.
It’s like starting a YouTube channel in 2008 or a travel blog in 2009 — far less competition, far more upside. The recruiters who establish themselves early in their niche (software engineers, GTM leaders, finance execs, deep tech, defense…) will dominate those categories for years.
The steps are simple. Start by bringing your daily work into Workfully:
- Start your Workfully profile.
- Post jobs, save candidates, build your pool.
- Ask candidates and clients reviews to build credibility
- Let Workfully send you clients and monetize your audience.
You can start for free, build your network, and create a compounding asset — all while you keep your current role or freelance work.
The in-house and agency models take your talent audience away from you.
Workfully gives it back to you.
Join workfully as a recruiter here.